The building was made of limestone and sounds echoed strangely, select tones amplified. Sometimes, Dave thought of recording them and using them for something. More often, he thought of how the town house was once home to a single family, before being carved up into little apartments, the detail stripped out of them, narrow halls carved in to make way for tiny baby rooms and closets. When Dave was little, his aunt Judy—Uncle Steve’s wife and Evelyn’s mother—had died, and his father and uncle had talked endlessly of leaving their apartments—Dave’s family in Cobble Hill, though it was just called “Brooklyn” then, and Evelyn’s in Brooklyn Heights—buying such a house, and restoring it to its former grandeur, for their two small families to share, the unstoppable Kohane brothers, no longer separated by the twenty-odd blocks between Joralemon Street and Baltic. They’d grown up in such a house, a few miles east in Midwood, chasing each other up and down the stairs (and profited nicely from its sale after their mother’s death). As kids, Dave and Evelyn paid weekly visits to this ancestral home. They, too, chased each other up and down the carpeted stairs, but with much less vigor than their fathers, both of them quiet children, always collapsing onto the nearest sofa with a book and a cookie, dark circles ringing their almond-shaped Kohane eyes. Dave, even skinnier then, could never quite work himself into the frenzy of teasing that came so naturally to the other little boys. He would try, pouncing on Evelyn as she sat reading, and pulling her hair or tickling her until she screamed “Stop, stop, stop, I hate you” in a hoarse voice and ran up the stairs to lock herself in her father’s old room, where she kept a cache of worn stuffed animals and dog-eared mystery novels. Dave would trail her, reach out a long, bony hand to grab her sneakered foot, and drag her down the stairs, booming “You must come vith me,” like his father imitating Bela Lugosi, but his heart wasn’t in it, and eventually he’d let her go.
Adolescence morphed him into one of those wan kids you see near Lincoln Center on Saturdays, heading off to Juilliard with a black nylon bag full of music, his skin cast green from the fluorescent light of the practice room. He did a double degree at Oberlin, piano performance and philosophy, which he finished in just four years, though—he frequently reminded his parents—most double degree students took five. And he had headed off to Eastman after graduation, full of hope and excitement. Or that’s what he’d thought at the time. Now he saw that maybe this wasn’t the case. Maybe he’d headed off to Eastman already defeated and full of fear. That if he’d really wanted that life—the solo career, the record deal, whatever—he wouldn’t have gone to Eastman at all, but would have entered the big contests, sought out the agent, done the things you do to become a sort of star. The whole point of going to Eastman was to wind up with a job at some sad, loser college.
In truth, he hated to think about that time—four years of his life spent in fucking Rochester—and tried to steel his mind against it. But, of course, the more he tried to turn himself to other subjects, the more he played over the injustices and embarrassments and disappointments of those years at grad school, which seemed, in a way, to have all blended into one long winter. He had arrived on campus—in a weird, unpopulated section of Rochester (which was itself a weird, unpopulated city, all too reminiscent of Cleveland)—full of swagger, certain that he was the department’s show pony. At Oberlin, he’d been a star, a coveted player—he and Tal equals then—respected by the composition students for his knowledge of new music, which was unusual in a pianist (or any sort of classical musician, for that matter). In fact, as an undergrad, he’d had his choice of schools—Juilliard, Peabody, and, yes, Eastman—but he’d chosen Oberlin for reasons both practical (they’d offered him a full ride) and sentimental (his father was ’67). As a freshman, he’d been given an orchestra seat, a rare honor for so young a pianist. And though he was perpetually behind on his practicing—endlessly playing catch-up, scrambling to learn pieces at the last minute, hours before a concert—it always worked out in the end.
He’d held his senior concert in Finney Chapel—just a few weeks after Liz Phair played there—and included some unusual stuff on the program, Xenakis, Satie, whatever. At least a hundred people came, a huge turnout for a recitaclass="underline" most were held in the Conservatory’s tiny auditoriums, attended only by professors, close friends, and bewildered, bored family. But Dave was not, as he often mused with satisfaction, a normal Con student. He pulled beer at the bar in the student union—the Disco, or the ’Sco, as the freshmen dorkily called it—along with Tal and Sadie, and had a large following among the grunge contingent, the flannel-clad guys who played in bands and the long-haired girls who worshipped them. He dated the girls (before Beth, of course, though there was a fling or two during) and hung around with the guys—a bunch of whom lived in a shambling pile of wood called “Slack House” or “House of Slack”—drinking bad beer, watching kung fu movies, and engaging in ironic discussions of popular culture. And he played in some of their bands, including an outfit called Quizmaster Quest (after an obscure video game) that became legendary on campus, due less to their sound, which was largely cribbed from fIREHOSE and the Minutemen, and more to the emaciated good looks of the lead singer, a hollow-eyed Minnesotan named Jan Jensen.
By comparison, Rochester was cold and wretched, both meteorologically and socially. All the other piano students were Asian and silent, or blowsy and schoolmarmish and headed for teaching jobs at Lower Arkansas Community College, or old and male and balding and terminally flustered, or outrageous flaming queens, who smoked cigarette after cigarette in the little courtyard outside the practice rooms. And he the lone straight male, wandering angry and disheveled around the dull, deserted streets, wondering if he should ask out the pretty flautist in his theory class, the one who always wore prim round-necked sweaters, like a coed from the 1950s. But her thin, childlike body disturbed him. He lay in bed at night, envisioning her next to him, her tiny hands running up and down his chest like spiders, and felt like a lech. He started practicing at weird hours and sleeping at even weirder ones, having no friends and no responsibilities other than the few classes he needed to attend and teach, all of them easier than his hardest at Oberlin. By October, it was freezing. He wore thermals under his jeans and sat by a bracingly ugly man-made waterfall that had been mysteriously set into the town’s creepy industrial landscape, feeling sorry for himself and allowing the crashing water—pouring off great slabs of smooth, dun-colored cement—to clear some of the detritus in his head, or, at the very least, to allow him to stop hearing his students’ imprecise notes, and Beth’s whispery voice on his answering machine.
He’d spent the previous summer at home, in Brooklyn, cramming four years of stuff into his tiny childhood room, the back abutment of his parents’ floor-through. At night, he drank beer with his friends from St. Ann’s, all of them staying in New York and starting jobs at publishing companies or design houses or theater troupes. He planned on practicing—planned on practicing every day and reading In Search of Lost Time. Instead he sat on the stoop of his building, smoking and skimming the arts section of the Times. He slept until noon, or sometimes one or two, then padded into the apartment’s tiny kitchen, unchanged since the mid-1970s, and made himself a cup of coffee in the smallest of his mother’s three French presses (his mother was insane about coffee).